High school English teachers have a term of art: the “mentor text.”

It refers to a story given to students for two purposes: to experience the content as the author intended and to learn certain writing strategies from a work of literature, perhaps foreshadowing or suspense.

Editor Kelley Benham French listened to Dallas Morning News reporter Maggie Prosser talk about her series on the impact of fentanyl and thought she had such a model text she could share. It was a story from reporter Brady Dennis called “After the sky fell,” part of a 300-word series of stories originally published in the St. Petersburg Times in 2005.

Months after sharing the mentor text, Prosser’s story, “Something of hers,” was submitted to The Roy Peter Clark Prize for Excellence in Short Writing category of the inaugural Poynter Journalism Prizes. Candidates in the category shared from one to five pieces under 800 words, about the length of a common news column. The winner would receive a $2,500 award.

The contest attracted a wide variety of writers using a wide variety of story forms. There were columns, reviews, short news reports, explainers and newsletter items, along with pieces from both commercial and public radio. There was even a short post from a high school student living in Turkey, one of an anthology of short pieces in a Sunday newspaper.

This rarely happens in journalism contests, but when the judging was completed, Prosser’s story rose above the rest and was the unanimous choice among the judges at every level.

Famous editor Maxwell Perkins had a strategy he would use if he thought one of his authors was in a rut. He would dispense the books of other authors, like a literary pharmacist giving drugs to speed an author up or slow them down.

“After the sky fell” by Brady Dennis is the story that helped Maggie imagine her prize-winning short story.

We suggest that you read the original version of the story, “‘Something of hers’: North Texas mom copes with grief after daughter’s fentanyl poisoning,” What follows is a point-by-point appreciation of the story by Clark, and then comments on how the writer and editor created the story.

The text and X-ray reading

“Something of hers”: North Texas mom copes with grief after daughter’s fentanyl poisoning

By public safety reporter Maggie Prosser and visual journalist Tom Fox, published Sept. 29, 2023

Somewhere in the disorienting shock of that day, between finding her daughter lying on her back in the bed and calling for help and saying words she couldn’t bear to hear coming out of her own mouth, Kathy Travis scanned the room for something to hold onto while clutching her daughter’s lifeless hand.

While X-Ray reading this story, I find myself embracing writing strategies that tend to rub against the grain. My first writing tool argues for lead sentences where the subject and verb of the main clause come early. Instead, they arrive at word 38 in a 53-word lead: “Kathy Travis scanned.”

This kind of sentence, where the main clause comes late, has different names. For generations it was called a “periodic sentence,” perhaps because the main action is withheld dramatically until near the period. And as we reach that period — the Brits call it a full stop — we hit on the most important phrase in the passage: “her daughter’s lifeless hand.” The white space that follows serves as a kind of punctuation itself, a sign that we have reached the end of the paragraph, and a visual relief from a lead that should not be a single word longer.

A soda. A snack. Her childhood stuffed giraffe, whose fur was patchy and singed, whose seams had burst. A silver bracelet with a charm that said “Family.” A plastic hair tie.

Consider the contrast between the first two paragraphs: a single long narrative sentence followed by five intentional fragments. Five periods in 31 words. Each period is a little stop sign that slows the pace for dramatic effect. And each detail competes for the role of what poet T.S. Eliot described as the “objective correlative,” that is, the object that signifies the most powerful emotion or idea. Of course, it comes last: “A plastic hair tie.”

911.

My daughter has died.

In a long text, italics can distract the reader. But here, the change of typeface is perfect. Unlike quotation marks, italics mark the language of an emergency telephone call.

Tom Wolfe, the father of New Journalism, argues that when storytellers use a short sentence, they want to communicate the gospel truth. All that white space helps set this mini-scene apart.

She picked up the hair tie and slipped it on her left wrist.

You may not notice this until now, but this key narrative sentence is 13 words long. Each word is only one syllable long, a drumbeat of language that picks up the pace.

She wore it to the funeral with a black pencil dress and the colorful striped pumps her daughter adored. The pastor read from the Second Epistle of Paul to Timothy: I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

The efficiency of the story is exemplified by this one-paragraph scene — only 46 words — that is able to contain details of her dress, along with the quote from the pastor. We can see. And we can hear.

Coiled like a telephone cord, it hugged the notch of her wrist as she worked under the fluorescent lights of her Flower Mound insurance agency. In time, its golden spirals molded to her arm.

The word choice, for the most part, is simple and stands out: coiled, cord, hugged, notch, wrist. Then comes the word fluorescent, which sounds exactly like another word: florescent. The first refers to a type of light radiation. The second refers to a “condition of flowering,” a coincidence, no doubt, with the name of the insurance agency: Flower Mound. It is also a coincidence that the color of the cord is not, say, black or red, but “golden,” an appropriate color for a tribute to her daughter.

I am not arguing that all or any of these writing moves are intentional. But when you live and work inside the language, subtle, even magical things can happen outside the intention of a writer or editor.

She wore it at her wedding with her sheath gown, pearls threaded along the bodice. “Is that a hair tie on your arm?” the photographer asked. “Do you want to take that off?”

Another sharp mini-scene in 33 words, this one using dialogue to put us there, and to raise the stakes for the mom’s devotion to the sacred object.

Now when she flips through those photos, she sees it there on her wrist while her new husband embraces her.

It’s speckled with dried, off-white paint from the time she redid the hallway trim.

A classic case of showing and not telling. We would take off, say, an expensive watch for painting, but the hair tie is more precious, almost like her skin.

She wore it aboard an Alaskan cruise. She wore it to meet a U.S. senator. She wore it to visit her daughter’s memorial park bench, tucked behind the soccer field.

A writer has a choice when creating an inventory. How many items? The number sends a secret message to the reader. Two examples, for instance, divide the world. But three, as in this case, encompass the world. The writer is saying: This is all you need to know for now. In such cases, three is the largest number in reporting and storytelling.

She has never taken the hair tie off. It became something she couldn’t take off.

Two more short sentences, slow down the pace for emotional impact.

Jessica Duke was always honest about her drug use. She used marijuana, then Adderall and Xanax, and then methamphetamine to cope with depression and anxiety and self-harm. She talked about going back to college. She questioned God. She went to rehab 11 times.

As a writer and a reader, I learn a lot from the naming of people and things. I count six names in this single paragraph: the dead young woman — four different types of drugs that marked her addiction — and God. The shortest sentences are devoted to the most important realities.

She was cleared to go back to work after quarantine. And then, on Friday, Jan. 29, 2021, she overdosed on meth laced with fentanyl and died. She was 25.

We may not think of numbers having emotional or narrative power, but they can. The formal recitation of the date carries with it the sense of an obituary, or what we might see carved on a tombstone. That last number, 25, is like a dagger to the heart.

Kathy Travis counts the days: Her bones know when it’s the 29th of every month, and they ache each Friday. Almost a thousand days since her daughter died. Almost a thousand days wearing the plastic hair tie.

The numbers carry over to this paragraph. And while editors tend to be suspicious of repetition when it feels like redundancy, it works here as a signal of the cycle of time.

“I just needed something of hers,” she said.

She looks down at it now. She asks herself, What if it breaks?

A final declaration of a mother’s desperate need for connection to her dead daughter, one that she knows is fragile, emphasized and marked creatively by that italic sentence at the very end.

How I wrote the story

By Maggie Prosser

I met Kathy Travis at a news conference with Sen. John Cornyn in October 2022. We set up an interview days later and talked for almost two hours about her daughter, Jessica Duke.

Kathy showed me her wedding photos and told me the anecdote about the photographer who asked if she wanted to take the hair tie off — that was the first time she mentioned it.

Enter: Kelley Benham French and the “Deadly Fake” 30-day series idea.

Kelley latched onto the detail about the hair tie because it’s a physical reminder of loss, and like grief, she carries it around everywhere. She also sent me a series of short stories by Brady Dennis as a possible model for what we called “HAIR TIE.”

I fell in love with the Dennis story “After the sky fell” and the way he uses a gut-punch ending to flip a narrative on its head. My favorite writer of all time, Taylor Swift, has a similar philosophy: She says the bridge of a song can change its entire meaning.

The structure stayed nearly the same from the beginning because I knew the ending needed to be Kathy fearing the hair tie would break. To me, once you read that, you can’t read the story the same way. (It’s also the line that makes everyone cry.) The rest of the story fell into place somewhat chronologically.

The first few drafts looked like my messy reporter’s notebook, with disjointed sentences and incomplete thoughts. At one point, I wanted to spell out the themes of grief and loss (something like, “Like her grief and loss, Kathy Travis carries it with her everywhere”). I’m glad that line got axed — it would have cheesed up and dumbed down the story.

Kathy and I were texting seemingly daily at that point. I asked her for pictures where you could see the hair tie and a description of what she was doing.

She said she got paint on the hair tie. What were you painting? What color? She said she was on a cruise in Alaska. An Alaskan cruise, like the brand, or a cruise to Alaska?

Jessica’s funeral service was livestreamed, so I watched it. I knew the detail about the senator because I was there nearly a year ago.

Then I did another two-hour interview with Kathy. What else was in the bedroom? What did Jessica look like? What did you say to the 911 operator? I even asked if I could read Jessica’s autopsy and toxicology report because it wasn’t publicly available.

My favorite detail about this story that most people may never realize — aside from me, Kathy and Kelley — is that we intentionally waited until the end of the 30-day series to publish it. In the piece, I emphasize the significance of Fridays and the 29th. The publish date, Sept. 29, 2023, was a Friday.

To write short, you have to report long. People may look at this story and think, “eh, that’s easy.” But this was an intensive exercise in interviewing, concision and editing. When you have such little space, the gaps in your writing and reporting are magnified. There’s a yearlong relationship and more than four hours of interviews packed into less than 500 words — and most of it is on the cutting room floor.

How I helped the writer

By Kelley Benham French

When we started our project, Maggie had been reporting on fentanyl for almost a year. She had sources and interviews and files and notebooks stashed in some mental vault that even she hadn’t fully inventoried. We’d be talking about a would-be source, and she’d say, “Oh! I interviewed her in October!” Or we’d pose a question and she’d say, “Wait! I have that right here!” And then she’d appear with armfuls of paper files and rifle around and TA! DA!

At some point I said, “Maggie, just take me through the vault.”

She told me about Kathy Travis, whom she’d known for months and interviewed for hours. But we didn’t exactly need another victim profile. I find victim profiles more challenging as I get older. We want them to sparkle with insight, but they rarely do.

When Maggie mentioned the hair tie, I saw the entire story in my head, beginning to end, and I just cut her off. “Hold up. Give me 300 words on the hair tie.”

Of course, what Maggie didn’t know yet is that I have my own brain vault: a library of stories of various structures and lengths that serve as inspiration for whatever the moment demands, be it a multi-threaded disaster narrative, a narrative accountability piece or an as-told-to. But I love the 300-word story the most, because it demands hard choices, deep reporting and sharp focus.

As a teacher, I assign a 300-word deadline story at the start of most semesters. I can diagnose a writer’s quirks in 300 words as well as I can in 3,000, and the 300-word scene becomes a building block to more complex structures. After all, a 1,500-word story is just three scenes and two sections of context. So I sent Maggie some of my faves, and it was easy from there.

I never saw her first draft. She was fiddling with structure so I told her to “Throw it like a dart.” There’s no room for anything fancy, and sticking the landing matters. What she turned in was nearly perfect. I helped with the top a little by having her call Kathy and ask what else was lying around the room. She nailed the word choices, the tone, the agonizing details. When my husband read it in a restaurant, on my phone, he cried.

Of course, she blew the 300-word limit, but we can’t have everything.

One of my most important jobs as an editor is to rise above the reporting and see an opportunity for surprise. I follow the wisdom of my longtime editor, Mike Wilson, who, on the first day I worked for him, told me to assume we would not do the conventional thing. What a gift that was. I try to pass it on as often as I can.